


A Brief History of Gotham City

by SapphyWatchesYouSleep (Sapphy)



Series: The Eternal Batman Universe [11]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: American History, Batman: A Death in the Family, Batman: Contagion, Gen, Gotham City - Freeform, Gotham City Police Department, Headcanon, Meta, Metafiction, Minor Original Character(s), No Man's Land (DCU), Pseudo-History
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 23:05:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14412438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/SapphyWatchesYouSleep
Summary: With thanks to the Gotham Historical Society and the Wayne Estate.





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of headcanons about Gotham. A lot. And I started writing them down, and then I figured I might as well make them readable, and then I realised I'd written 8,500 words (and counting).
> 
> This history is canon is almost all my DC fic, but it's most canon in the EBU.
> 
> Feel free to use this as a resource for any DCU fics, so long as you credit me.
> 
> Some of this stuff is canon, some is not. If people are interested I'll write up some notes on what is and isn't canon and why I made the choices I did.

There have been many histories of Gotham written. The city of Batman and the Joker has long captured the imaginations of people around the world. Even before the age of the superhero, Gotham was a byword for the weird and the dangerous.

This work is not intended to be comprehensive. No one work could truly encapsulate the whole history of the city without running to several volumes. Instead, I intend this book to provide a starting point, introducing the key events of the city’s history and providing a bibliography for the those who wish to dig a little deeper.

My own interest in the city began when my parents moved there from New York when I was thirteen. Like many natives of the Cinderella city, my opinions of Gotham were not good, and I was heartbroken to be leaving the city where I had grown up. Once I arrived in Gotham however, I quickly became enchanted.

Gotham is a city like no other. It is a city in which the weird is so every day that most locals don’t even notice it. Nothing short of large-scale natural disasters have ever managed to disrupt the city for long. New Yorkers are tough, but Gothamites are bulletproof. As Jack Ryder famously said, “in other cities, they laugh at clowns and run from guns, but in Gotham, it’s the other way around.”

Gotham is a city which exists a little outside of reality - both metaphorically and literally. Jason Blood explores this in his book “Gotham: a metaphysical history of America’s strangest city”, and with the author’s permission, I include below part of his translation of a Sheeda creation myth which provides one of the most poetic explanations of the metaphysics of reality.

“In the beginning there was nothing and it was not real. Into this unreality stepped the creator, the first being. They came from nothing, and of nothing they were made. They lay in the void, and they dreamed.

Without reality to constrain them, the dreams of the creator took on life. They were Arawn (the first Sheeda) and Eua (the first human) and from them, all living things are descended. They created the world, crafting the things they required to live from the void. However, one-night Eua had a terrible dream, and from her dream was born a demon of great and terrible power.

The creator, seeing the danger posed by the power of creation set about crafting a way to restrain the power of creation, and this they called ‘reality’. However, once they had imposed reality upon the earth, Arawn began to fade and die, for he was a creature of magic and could not live in reality, just as Eua could not live in unreality.

And so the creator split the world into two - half of it was Here, which was home to Eua and her daughters, and half of it was There, which was home to Arawn and his sons, and betwixt them he crafted a great chasm which is called Between to protect them one from the other.”

It is a fascinating story, made more interesting by the fact that it is at least partially true. Magical experimentation has shown that there is a gap between the dimensions in which humans live and those inhabited by beings of magic like the Fae. Those who travel to the lands of the Fae cross this space often without realising it, and most forms of teleportation magic work by taking the caster through the Bleed (the technical term for what the Sheeda call the Between).

From the perspective of magical theory, many of what physicists would understand as pocket dimensions are in fact pieces of reality which got caught in the Bleed. According to most experts on the subject, this is a common occurrence, but most such dimensions are so small as to be inaccessible and undetectable.

Gotham is a little different. According to Blood’s theory, which is disputed by some in both the magical and scientific communities, Gotham occupies just such a bubble and was at one time equally inaccessible to those not magically inclined.

The first founders of Gotham, Blood claims, were not pilgrims or entrepreneurs, but the ancestors of the people known today as the ‘Witchmen’, a secretive cult who make their home somewhere below the New York subway system. It was these ancestors of modern Gothamites who forced the doorway between dimensions open wide enough to allow those without magical power to enter, and who began the process of building the city.

The archaeological record does go some way to supporting this theory. The cave system beneath Gotham has been found to contain the remains of paintings believed to depict the Witchmen’s deity, Melmoth, and a recent dig in Slaughter Swamp, on the city limits, found evidence of human habitation in the area dating to approximately 100 years before Jeremiah Wayne was said to have founded the city. Since we know from both the archaeological records and verbal histories that the area was not home to any Native American Tribes, this suggests that the area was already inhabited by European settlers when Jeremiah Wayne, Robert Kane and Otis Crowne first stumbled upon the islands.

We will likely never know for certain. The Witchmen are deeply secretive, and records of the early years of the Gotham are scarce. But personally, I’m inclined to believe Blood’s version of events. There is something magical about Gotham and the people who choose to live there.


	2. The early years of the city (1769 to 1900)

Written records of the town begin in 1769, with the arrival of Jeremiah Wayne, Robert Kane, and Otis Crowne, traveling fur traders who had been looking for somewhere to settle down permanently. There are conflicting accounts of their lives before they arrived on the Islands we now know a Gotham. Several contemporary sources, including the few surviving letters written by them, suggest the three were old friends and business partners who were driven by a pioneer spirit to found a new town. However, surviving legal documents from Plymouth, MA, refer to “Jeremy Wayne alias John Goode and Otis Crowne alias Simon King, tried on 17 March in the year of our Lord 1764 for the crimes of fraud, selling short measure and embezzling funds provided for the relief of the poor.” History does not record whether the men were found guilty, but it is highly likely that these are the same men who would go on to found Gotham. Given that the penalty for such crimes would have been death by hanging, one can understand their desire to start a new life a long way from Plymouth.

Thanks to the careful preservation work of the Crown family, we have both Otis Crowne’s account book from the time, and a number of letters dating from shortly after the supposed founding of the city, including some from his fellow founders. Most significantly to the historian of the city, we have a letter from Jeremiah Wayne, dated 1773, which reads:

“I went again to speak to the Submissionary about the church. Many still object but I believe calm heads will prevail. This will soon be a good Christian town.”

If we accept Blood’s theory that the original inhabitants of the town were self-proclaimed demon-worshippers, the building of a church suggests that the immigrant population had grown at this point to be large enough to justify employing a priest.

Thanks again to the Crowne records, we know the name of the priest who eventually arrived - a Jesuit by the name of Father Martin. (All three founders appear to have been Catholic). The parish records from this time do survive, but they were badly damaged in the great quake. However, transcriptions suggest that the early years of Catholicism in Gotham saw an unusually high number of adult baptisms. These may well be former-Protestants who converted, though Blood cites this as further proof of his theory.

Whatever the truth, by 1790 local census data suggests a population of around 15,000, living primarily on the Island now known as Midtown, most of whom listed their religion as Catholic. This is a startlingly rapid growth of population, however when one studied the professions of those found on the census it becomes clear that Gotham was fast becoming an established port, and anecdotal accounts from around this time suggest it was well known as a place which received a high number of passenger ships along with the usual trading vessels.

Beyond the letters mentioned above, we have little record of the town between the 1760s and 1790s. It played no significant role in the Revolutionary War, except that the Crowne records report 30 barrels of herring and 20 barrels of salt pork being provided at a reduced charge to a group of young Gotham men who were leaving to join the army. From this, we can assume that Crowne at least was on the side of Independence, but no record survives of Wayne or Kane’s stance on the war.

The first town charter had been drawn up in 1783, but following the Declaration of Independence a revised charter was produced, of which only fragments of the original remain, and the positions of Mayor and councilors formally created. Much of the documentation relating to early political life in the town was lost in the fire of 1883, but an engraving in Gotham Cathedral (built in the 1840s) lists every mayor of Gotham, right back to Jeremiah Wayne himself, and it is impossible to avoid noticing just how often the names Kane, Wayne and Crowne appear. Later they are joined by the Dumas family, who moved to Gotham from Louisiana under a cloud of scandal in the 1820s, and the Elliots, a long-standing Gotham family who rose to prominence in the 1830s when Thomas Elliot was elected Mayor in 1832.

In 1791, James Kane (second son of Robert Kane) was elected to represent New Jersey in the Senate, replacing William Patterson who had resigned the position in order to become Governor of New Jersey the previous year. He served two terms before being unseated, and it would be another 100 years before any Gothamite again sat on Capitol Hill.

Gotham would suffer greatly when, in 1795, the French government declared all American vessels would be subject to seizure by the French Navy. As a port town with almost no growing land or raw materials, trading ships were the main source of income. Between 1795 and 1797 around 300 ships were seized, 90 of which were headed to or from Gotham.

The impact was further worsened by an outbreak of cholera the following year, which began in the East Side docks, especially around Miller Harbour, and quickly spread throughout Midtown. With no known cure, or even any real understanding of how the disease spread, all the citizens of Gotham could do was ride it out. It did eventually recede, and by 1799 the city was free of the disease. Estimates of the numbers who died are somewhere between 800 and 1,200 people.

In 1824, a Methodist preacher by the name of Isaiah Woodward arrived in Gotham and was successful in converting a large number of the traditionally Catholic majority population with his fiery sermons and charismatic personality. Among the converts was Isiah Wayne, then patriarch of the Wayne family. This marked a significant change in the religious life of the city, with a growing Protestant fervor among the white middle and upper classes. Catholicism became increasingly the religion of the emerging Italian immigrant populations, while the older Gotham families converted to Protestantism.

Three years after his arrival in the city, Isiah Woodward was murdered while leaving an evening service by two men, Jacob Cole and Judah Fry. The two men claimed to be part of a group calling themselves the Brotherhood of Melmoth, demon worshippers who sought to destroy the influence of Christianity on Gotham. The two men were questioned extensively, but no evidence of the Brotherhood having any existence outside their fevered minds was ever found, and the two men were hanged shortly thereafter.

While many researchers have tried to find traces of the Brotherhood, especially following the hugely popular 1973 horror film “Melmoth” which was based on fictionalized versions of the events, nothing in either the written or archaeological record has ever been found to support their claims.

(However, it is worth noting here that, at least according to Blood in his ‘Metaphysical History’, Melmoth is the name of the Being worshipped by the modern Witchmen. He’s sometimes referred to as a demon, as in the 1973 film, but is more properly a member of the Sheeda, a trans-dimensional warrior race who are probably the origin of many of the fairy myths found in Western Europe).

The town prospered in the mid-1800s when a growing middle class allowed Gotham to come into its own as a center of import and export businesses, with the crime and corruption that went hand in hand with that. Martha Lowell, who emigrated to the city in 1843, wrote in a letter to her mother in 1858, “The main industry seems to be smuggling. Most everyone you meet is involved in the trade in some capacity, and it is treated as though it were as honorable a profession as that of doctor or minister. The smugglers have brought great wealth to Gotham, and so they are loved by the people.”

As always, the truth is a little murkier than that. While it is true that the city’s wealth flourished at this time, and that smuggling was certainly a major profession, it brought with it Gotham’s now ubiquitous organized crime.

Immigration to the city was at its height at this time, and while most immigrants were law-abiding citizens (or what passed for it in Gotham), the city began to see gang warfare become a major problem as competing groups carved out territories for themselves.

The Italian immigrants of the 1850s were followed by the Ashkenazim, the Chinese, the Slavs and Poles, and the Irish. The city began to sprawl as the different groups carved out the own territories.

The free men of color and the Eastern Europeans maintained uneasy peace in Uptown. The Italians resented the incursion of the Irish into Midtown. The Jews and the Chinese of Downtown watched the original inhabitants’ descendants uneasily. Every new group had brought its own problems with it, and warring crimelords fanned the flames beneath a city always on the boil.

Every few years the whole simmering pot would erupt. The people became used to the idea of violent riots as a way of life, and the idea of the ‘Gotham Riot’ became a popular newspaper shorthand for fights which had no real cause. Indeed, one editorial in the Metropolis Daily Star (later renamed as the Planet) described the early stirrings of what was to become the American Civil War as “merely a Gotham Riot - a lot of shouting and unnecessary fuss over very little.”

Most historians agree that the blame for the great Gotham Riot of 1883 should be laid at the door of Don Giovanni Calabrese, a senior member of the Gotham branch of the Cosa Nostra, who framed the O’Shea crime family for an attack on Don Roberto Falcone, one of Calabrese’s main rivals for leadership of the Italian-American Mafia in Gotham.

Supporters of the Falcone and O’Shea crime families clashed several times over the following week, culminating in the fire-bombing of City Hall. Records do not record which side was responsible for the attack, but for the populace of Gotham, it was the final straw.

Rioting broke out across the city, and several members of the city’s Irish community were killed in the probably mistaken belief that they were working for the O’Shea family. When the Mayor and Council dispatched the police to quell the riots, the terrified officers opened fire on a large crowd who had gathered near what is now Robinson Park.

The English diarist Thomas North, who emigrated to Gotham in the 1850s, wrote that “such brutal treatment of innocent souls has not been seen since the days of Peterloo. Fully 200 lie dead, and injured perhaps 900.”

These figures are an exaggeration (more sober estimates put the numbers at something closer to 30 dead and 450 injured) but they were widely believed at the time. The period of civil unrest that followed saw the first families (as the Dumas, Waynes, Elliots, Kanes, and Crownes were collectively known) unseated from the city’s positions of power for the first time.

According to Tim Wayne in his book “Speak not a whispered word” it was at this time that the Court of Owls was first formed. Since the book’s publication, many have argued that it was an elaborate hoax, or that the Court of Owls did exist but lacked the political power he credited them with. Still others have claimed that the history of the Court is far longer than he suggests. Drake addressed this last theory in an interview in which he claimed that the idea of the Court as something stemming from the earliest days of the city was an idea which came from the Court itself, used to legitimize their claim on political power.

The evidence for the existence of the Court is compelling, and though full details were never made public, it is likely that the series of high profile arrests of members of Gotham’s high society in the early 2000s were, as Drake later claimed, an attempt by the GCPD to cripple the Court.

The Waynes, Kanes, Elliots, and Crownes grew and multiplied over this period, and when the Dumas failed to do the same, their place in Gotham high society (and on the Court) was taken by the Cobblepots, who had arrived in the city from the Ukraine in the 1880s and quickly cornered the city’s fish trade through a combination of skill, luck, and dirty dealing. (For more on the fascinating history of the family see ‘The smell of money’ by Jacqueline Morran.)

Despite the influence of the Court of Owls, the First Families (as they came to be known) never regained the direct political power they had wielded in the early years of the city. Instead, they played the roles of kingmakers, throwing fortunes behind the election campaigns of their preferred candidates. (The one exception to this trend being Theodore Cobblepot, Mayor from 1891 to 1909, the longest serving Mayor in Gotham history.)

In 1887, the people were to rise up again in one of the strangest moments in Gotham’s history. Workers contracted to drain part of Slaughter Swamp which was overlooked by the newly constructed Wayne Manor had long been complaining of terrible working conditions, poor pay, and regular outbreaks of malaria in the summer. In October, frustrated by the lack of response, a group of the workers decided to take matters into their own hands and used the knowledge of necromancy that had been passed down among the oldest Gotham families to raise the body of one Cyrus Gold, a colleague who had recently succumbed to malaria, from the dead. This zombie, nicknamed Solomon Grundy, was ordered by the workers to kill Isiah Wayne. (The Gotham version of the popular 'Solomon Grundy' rhyme ends a little differently than that known elsewhere. After “Buried on a grey and glorious Sunday” it continues “Rose again on a bleak and blustery Monday, Mind he don't catch you - Solomon Grundy” and forms part of a popular children's game similar to Grandmother's Footsteps or What's the Time Mr. Wolf.)

On 31st October, Grundy broke down the door of Wayne Manor and killed 4 inhabitants, including Isiah Wayne.

Although the workers freely admitted what they had done, the Judge ruled that no conviction could legally be made for the murder, and instead the men were charged with grave-robbing (which carried a sentence of hard labor, rather than being a capital offense.)

The case caught the imagination of the people, and to this day while people in the rest of the country celebrate Halloween, Gothamites take to the streets for ghoulish Grundy’s night celebrations.


	3. The 20th Century: War, Revolution and Riots

By 1901, Gotham had gained a reputation as a city that would take anyone, and where anyone could prosper, and it attracted those who did not fit anywhere else. As the city’s reputation as a center of organized crime grew, so did its reputation for strangeness and, most notably, magic. Jason Blood moved to the city in 1901, and describes it in the introduction to his ‘Metaphysical History’ as “a city uniquely suited to those of a magical persuasion, owing to its position outside normal reality and the eccentricity of the people who make their home there.”

1901 also saw the founding of the first Arkham Asylum by Dr. Amadeus Arkham (later himself a patient there). Although founded on solid moral principles, corruption, lack of oversight, and Dr. Arkham’s own breakdown led to the hospital becoming a byword for the cruelty of early 20th-century mental health treatment. Theodore Cobblepot famously complained that “people never mention Gotham without also bringing up that confounded place in the same breath, as though they were one and the same. It seems that in the mind of the American people I am not a mayor, but rather the superintendent of the world’s largest lunatic asylum.”

This complaint, reported by the Gotham Eagle and later picked up by national newspapers, had the opposite effect than that Mayor Cobblepot desired, and “America’s largest asylum” became a popular nickname for the city throughout the 1910s.

Reputation was the least of the city’s worries. Under Cobblepot corruption grew, and increasing distrust in the government of the city, combined with growing coverage of societal issues by local and national newspapers and an influx of socialist and anarchist ideas from Europe, led to massive political unrest in the city through the early part of the 20th century. Mass walkouts and strike actions became common in the city’s factories, and members of the women’s suffrage movement gained notoriety for picketing the Mayor’s private home. (As part of New Jersey, women in Gotham had had the right to vote until 1807, a fact which perhaps helped fuel the popularity of the suffrage movement among the women of the city). While initially thought to be humorous by most wealthy citizens, public opinion turned against both the strikers and the suffragists when America joined WWI in 1917, and a number of high profile arrests were made of those believed to be ring-leaders in the worker’s and women’s rights movements. These arrests did little to calm public opinion, which only worsened when the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 killed an estimated 80,000 people in the city’s slums.

The corruption already rife in the city's police force became inescapably ingrained during prohibition. The city’s role as a key port, combined with its history as a center for smuggling, meant it quickly became a key point of entry for illegally imported alcohol. It is estimated that 65% of all alcohol illegally entering the country came in via Gotham, and production of the moonshine known locally as ‘strychnine’ became a booming cottage industry. (Police working the docks were colloquially known as ‘water rats’, and by manufacturing their own alcohol, rather than importing it, people were avoiding paying bribes and were thus said to be ‘killing the rats’, hence the name.)

The so-called ‘water rats’ came to see the bribes they received as a part of their wages, and this attitude became so widespread that Mayor Reginald Winter in 1932 justified his refusal to give police officers a raise by pointing out that many of them received a guaranteed income from bribes and protection rackets.

The Great Depression was to hit Gotham hard. Much of the city’s infrastructure was dedicated to the manufacture and import of luxury goods. In particular, the city was known for its jewelry manufacture, centered around the area known as the Diamond District. As the stock market plummeted, demand for luxury goods rapidly decreased, leaving a large portion of the city’s population unemployed. Attempts by some of the city’s wealthier citizens, especially Adam Elliot, to set up relief programs were quickly derailed by corruption and fraud on the part of those hired to run the programs, and in 1931, the Gotham Gazette ran the front-page headline “The City Riots… Again.”

While the widespread rioting was put down after only two days, looting and property damage added to the heavy financial burden on the citizens, and for the first time in its history, Gotham saw widespread emigration as its citizens moved to New York and Metropolis, or became migrant workers, in the hope of finding relief from poverty.

Frustrated by the failure of his relief programme, Adam Elliot persuaded the Waynes (by now one of the richest families in America) and Kanes to join him in supporting Roosevelt in the 1932 elections, and many have cited the support of Gotham’s first families as a key factor in his victory.

As the welfare programmes he implemented as President were centrally run, they were less affected by corruption than local attempts had been, and by 1935 the city was in recovery. By 1940, the population of the city was back to what it had been before the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 and rising, and the increasing population inhabiting limited space saw the richer inhabitants moving out of the city and into the area known as Bristol, on the mainland, where the Gothic monstrosity that is Wayne Manor already stood.

Gotham became a key center for military recruitment during WWII when economic disparity and the ending of some of Roosevelt’s key welfare programs lead many young men to seek out the Army or Navy as a reliable career choice. For the first time in its existence, Gotham had a good reputation, with slogans like “If Gotham can do it, so can we!” and “Be like the men of Gotham: serve your country” appearing in many regional newspapers.

Many of the jewelry workshops of the Diamond District were converted to munitions manufacture during the war, and a wave of patriotic feeling struck the city, which had traditionally seen itself as a city apart. Notably, for the history of Gotham, there was not a single recorded riot or mass protest between 1941 and 1949, the only period since the Great Riot of 1883 to be so peaceful.

Gotham’s star continued to rise throughout the late 40s and early 50s (it was at this time at journalists at the New York Times coined the nickname ‘the Cinderella city’ for their hometown, as she became increasingly overshadowed by her bigger sisters Gotham and Metropolis.) Although immigration to the USA as a whole was restricted during this time, Gotham saw a significant upswing in its population as Jewish and Russian immigrants moved into Downtown in large numbers, along with the first wave of Mexican immigrants, who mainly settled in Midtown.

Kennedy won huge support from Gotham in the 1960 elections, thanks in part to the city’s large Catholic population. At the same time, the civil rights movement, which had not greatly affected the city previously, gained greater prominence, and a there were a large number of protests in support of the repeal of Jim Crow laws, and calling for a solution to institutionalized racism in the GCPD. In 1963 this was joined by the women’s rights movement as, to quote Gotham Congressman Nathan Duccard “the greatest threats to our way of life, our safety, and our history.” (Duccard lost office the following year after a high profile sex scandal.)

Protests, marches, strikes, and sit-ins remained peaceful for the most part but regularly caused large areas of the city to grind to a halt. In 1965, Hiram P Featherworth (certainly an assumed name, though sources disagree about what his real name was) ran for Mayor with the promise to construct a second set of roads parallel to existing ones specifically for the use of protestors, to avoid congestion.

This relative peace was to break in the summer of 1968 when, 85 years to the day since the torching of the town hall during the great Gotham Riot, an initially peaceful anti Vietnam war protest ended in the deaths of three protesters after someone in the crowd allegedly threw a stone at one of the police officers in attendance, and the police returned fire.

The city quickly descended into chaos, as the old Gotham tradition of rioting to show displeasure with government returned with a vengeance. Between June 1968 and March 1971 there were 18 riots (though some have argued that several of these were actually peaceful protests, slandered by a conservative-leaning press.) The most famous of these, known as the Burnley Siege, lasted 9 days, with repeated clashes between the GCPD and the majority African-American inhabitants of Burnley. Reactions among the press were split between those who condemned the rioters for their violence and those who praised them for upholding a fine old Gotham tradition.

The siege was to eventually end in tragedy when undercover officers entered the home of one of the ringleaders, activist and musician Kenny Smoles, and shot 7 people, included Smoles’ six-year-old daughter. Smoles himself survived but later died in police custody under suspicious circumstances. The widely held opinion, both at the time and now, was that he was murdered by the police to stop him testifying about the raid and the police harassment he had suffered in the months that led up to it.

While the Crips and the Bloods were gaining ground first in Los Angeles and then elsewhere, Gotham’s own Burnley Town Boys (later the Burnley Town Massive, or BTM) was formed by young black men who felt disenfranchised and who had given up on the idea that they might get out of poverty or protect their neighborhoods by legal means. Membership of the gang exploded following the Siege, with many seeing it as a sign that the bipartisan approach favored by Smoles (who had been a strong advocate of working together with other minority ethnic and religious communities) had failed.

The police, used to the more ordered hierarchies of Gotham’s various mafias, were unprepared to deal with the rise of a street gang to a position of real power in the criminal underworld, and moves to curb the growth of the gang were taken far too late to have any real impact. Indeed, their ill-timed and ill-conceived retaliation only encouraged the growth of the gang, as arrests of young black men on spurious charges became increasingly common.

Gang culture became an increasingly powerful part of Gotham’s landscape. While street gangs had always existed in Gotham, its history as a center of organized crime had meant that until the BTM, independent gangs had never lasted long before being either destroyed or swallowed up by one of the larger criminal organizations. Now for the first time, they were gaining ground.

It’s no coincidence that Gotham’s first vigilantes emerged at the same time as the gangs. They were in many ways better suited to dealing with the problem, able to respond quickly to new problems, and unrestrained by the whims of the city’s invariably corrupt officials.

The Martian Manhunter and the first hero to be known as the Green Lantern (who was apparently unaffiliated with the Galactic Peacekeeping force we’re familiar with today) had both been operating out of Gotham city since the late fifties, but Gotham’s unique place in the landscape of Superheroes and Vigilantes is generally accepted to have begun in 1965 with the first recorded sighting of Black Canary I in Gotham’s Fashion District.

Of the original Justice Society of America, Black Canary, Wildcat and Doctor Mid-Night are known to have operated in Gotham City and are generally accepted to have been residents. Tim Wayne, in his biography/autobiography “Batman: the men behind the mask”, makes a reference to a young Bruce Wayne visiting "a certain Florist in the Bowery, and a respected Dojo in Robbinsville” and this is generally accepted to be a reference to the secret identities of Black Canary and Wildcat.

Initially viewed with suspicion by the general public (thanks in part to Black Canary’s choice of costume), the three had some real success in dealing with the problems the police were unable or unwilling to touch. Weapons smuggling, a problem in Gotham since the 1800s, decreased significantly thanks to Wildcat, whose regular patrol route included the docks. Black Canary gained a fearsome reputation among the city’s less savory crimelords thanks to her defense of sex-workers, especially those who had been the victims of human trafficking. Dr. Midnight, who operated mainly in Uptown, wasn’t able to stop the spread of the BTM, but he is believed to be responsible for providing the information behind a number of successful sting operations by the police on high ranking drug-dealers in the Burnley area.

Ultimately, however, their prominence was relatively short-lived, and Black Canary I, in particular, is thought to have been fully retired by 1975. Tim Wayne makes reference to Dr. Mid-Night operating as a paramedic for the wider vigilante and metahuman community during the 90s, but reports of him acting as a superhero mainly cease around 1978.

Despite the success these vigilantes had, and their membership of the Justice Society, they are not the roots Gotham’s distinctive vigilante culture. That owes everything to Bruce Wayne, the first Batman, who began operating in 1982.

Within a year of his first appearance, Batman was as established a part of the city as the terrible weather, and when Robin made his first appearance in 1988, it was clear that his legacy would be a part of the city for a long time to come.

But Gotham is as famous for its villains as its heroes. There has been much debate over the years as to whether the existence of Batman and his allies lead directly to the emergence of what Constance Mcleod called ‘The Gotham Villain’. Certainly, it is true that our first record of a costumed criminal (excluding vigilantes) occurs in March 1983, six months after the emergence of Batman.

Despite the popular theory that the Joker was the first ‘supervillain’, the first recorded arrest of someone using a costume and code-name to commit crimes is actually Joe Coyne, aka the ‘Penny Plunderer’, who repeatedly stole pennies from parking meters, donation boxes and newspaper kiosks in the early 80s. What marks him as fitting specifically into the mold of a ‘Gotham Villain’ is that he would only ever take the pennies, even when larger denomination coins were available. This kind of obsessive adherence to a theme is a key feature of what distinguishes the supervillains of Gotham from those found elsewhere.

It cannot be overstated how much Batman changed the face of Gotham city in that first decade. Organised crime declined throughout the 1980s for the first time since records began, to be replaced by the far less organized Supervillains. While corruption remained (and still remains) a major problem in the city, the sharp drop in the power and influence of organized crime allowed for systematic reform for the first time since the city’s founding.

However as governmental and police corruption lessened, new avenues for corporate corruption opened up, most notably what was known as ‘the Batman Flip’ - buying up property which had been damaged by supervillain activity, waiting for State or Wayne disaster funds to repair it, and then selling it on for a profit. This became so commonplace by the 21st century that some experts cite it as a major factor in leading to the housing bubble collapse in the early 2010s, as increasing numbers of Gotham Citizens were unable to buy back the properties they had sold.

Under the Reagan administration, this new brand of corporate corruption flourished as increasing numbers of industries were deregulated. At the same time, the wealth gap between Gotham’s richest and poorest citizens (already one of the highest in the Western world) skyrocketed. The city had always had a reputation as depressing, thanks to the weather and the crime, but in the 80s it became a byword for everything that was wrong with 20th-century urban living. Homelessness, violent crime and suicide rates all skyrocketed, and anarchism enjoyed a brief popular revival among the city’s youth.

It’s no surprise that when Punk arrived in Gotham in the early 80s, it quickly exploded in popularity, dominating the city’s alternative music scene. Joey Ramone, after a gig in the city’s famous Watershed venue, commented that “Gotham is the real home of American punk”. The city produced a number of influential bands during this time, including Signal, Strychnine and the Quick and the Dead.

In 1984, Gotham’s political scene experienced a brief upheaval when Harvey Dent, a brilliant lawyer and old school-friend of Bruce Wayne, was elected as District Attorney. He pushed hard for reform, especially in relation to corruption, and fought to get increased funding to provide court-appointed defense lawyers to those who couldn’t afford their own counsel.

For a brief moment, the city rallied behind Dent. He was lauded in the newspapers, and in 1984 was interviewed by TIME, who described his job as ‘the most dangerous in America’. This was to prove horribly true just a few weeks later when, during the trial for a mid-level member of Salvatore Maroni’s mafia, one of Maroni’s men threw acid into Dent’s face.

Later examinations were to show that Dent had been mentally unstable for some time and that the added stress of his new job had only exacerbated that instability, but at the time Dent’s descent from what that Gazette called ‘a modern Adonis’ into the Supervillain Two-Face shocked the city to its core. Many saw it as proof that Gotham could not be saved.

Around the same time as the city was mourning Harvey Dent, the city’s Queer population began organizing on a large scale as AIDs became an increasing problem in Pink Town and elsewhere. New York is better known for its role in the Queer revolution thanks to the Stonewall riot, but Gotham saw a large number of Marches, Rallies and other protests in the 80s. In 1986 Bruce Wayne founded a shelter for AIDs victims who lacked anywhere else to go, one of the first to be formally established. The original building has not survived, but today a memorial to the dead occupies the spot where it once stood.

Things improved in the early 90s. The Wayne Foundation, founded by Martha Wayne in the 1950s, began a number of welfare programs in tandem with Wayne Industries expansion, and the increase in jobs and affordable housing combined with after-school programs, subsidized childcare and mentorship programmes saw a dramatic increase to quality of life for many Gotham residents.

Gotham experienced something of a renaissance during this time, with local artists, filmmakers, writers, and musicians becoming nationally acclaimed. The Gazette became well respected in artistic circles for its thoughtful reviews, especially of films. In 1994 Gotham native April Huang became the first classical musician in more than a decade to make the top 10 with a haunting original piece entitled “City of Dreams”. (She would follow this five years later with “Requiem for the City of Dreams”, written to raise money for the Gotham relief fund.) Norton Walls won the Palme d'Or for his film ‘Nighthawk’, about a young man with Autism who becomes obsessed with the hero Nightwing. Lazlo Szabo’s ‘Nightmare Town’ series of young adult horror novels, based on the writer's own childhood on Gotham’s Upper East Side, became international best sellers.

The tourism industry boomed, and large-scale renovations of the Gotham Museum and Art Gallery and the Elizabeth Arkham Botanical Gardens, as well as massive redevelopment projects along the waterfront in Downtown, were begun.

In 1996, Bruce Wayne founded Rainbow Relief, a shelter for LGBT youth, in memory of his son Jason (the second Robin) who had died earlier that year. In response to a high demand, three more shelters, along with a walk-in center offering advice and guidance, were founded. The suicide rate among queer teenagers in the city dropped to the lowest in the country, and the program continues to this day.

This golden age was to come to a halt in 1998, when an outbreak of a disease originally engineering for biological warfare (the Ebola Gulf A Virus, better known as ‘the Clench’) hit the city, killing more than 40,000 people in the first month. The entire city was quarantined while researchers worked on a treatment, which was eventually found. Despite this, a combination of the high death toll and the number of people fleeing the city before and after the quarantine meant that the city’s population dropped by almost half in a single year.

In November 1999, only weeks after the CDC declared the Clench outbreak officially over, the city was hit by a devastating earthquake. Small tremors were relatively common, and a small quake in 1827 had destroyed several buildings along the fault line, but this was unlike anything the city had seen before, measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale (the highest recorded quake in the USA since the 1965 Rat Islands Quake in Alaska. For comparison, the 1989 San Francisco quake measured 6.7).

A quake of that magnitude hitting one of the most densely populated cities in America, which was still reeling from the recent outbreak and lacked the funding necessary to rebuild, was a disaster the government had not prepared for.

Political scientists, psychologists, lawyers, and historians have all tried to unpick the series of decisions which led to the passing of the “No Man’s Land bill”, as it came to be known, which resulted in the US Government declaring Gotham to be legally outside of US borders. Corruption certainly played a part, as did fear and a very real dislike for Gotham and its citizens. Probably no one will ever fully understand what happened. What matters, ultimately, is the effect it had.

The population of Gotham were given 1 week to evacuate, after which the 5 bridges connecting the city to the mainland, 2 of them dating back to the 19th century, were destroyed by the army corps of engineers, along with the subway tunnels running underneath the Gotham river. Those who chose to remain, or who could not afford to leave, (and it is heartbreaking to read first-hand accounts and realize how many chose to stay behind because they were still searching for loved ones among the rubble), were trapped in the city with no power, no running water and severely limited supplies of food.

I have read many firsthand accounts of life in the ruined city, but one of the most vivid comes from “Batman: the men behind the cowl” in which Tim Wayne (who had taken up the mantle of Robin only months before the quake) described his time in the city.

“I once had my throat cut in a fight. I don’t remember very much between then and waking up in the hospital, but I have one very vivid memory of lying on the sidewalk, watching my blood run into a storm drain, and thinking that even then I still wasn’t as scared as I’d been during No Man’s Land. The sheer desperation of it all was overwhelming in ways I can’t put into words. There was nowhere you could go to get away from the death, nothing you could do that had any real impact. I helped deliver 5 babies that year, 3 of whom didn’t make it to a week. I heard more than once about people killing their children so that they didn’t have to watch them freeze, or starve. The smell of death was utterly inescapable, but you never got used to it or stopped smelling it. It was just there, all the time, reminding you that you might be next, and the memory of it will haunt me for the rest of my life. The Batman doesn’t kill, but I’m not ashamed to admit that every time I heard that one of the people responsible for the bill had died, I celebrated. I don’t think Gotham every fully recovered from No Man’s Land. I know no one who survived it ever did.”

The law was eventually repealed, and America watched in fascinated horror as the true scale of the tragedy became clear. Official government statistics had suggested around 3,000 people remained in the city. What the Red Cross found when they arrived on the scene was more than 15,000 survivors, including inmates and patients from both Blackgate Prison and Arkham Asylum. There has never been an accurate count of the numbers of dead, but it is estimated that at an absolute minimum, 7,000 people died during No Man’s Land, not including those killed by the quake. The reality is probably far higher.

The shocking reveal of the extent of the human cost of the law rocked the nation, and certainly played a key role in the Republican’s rise to power in the following year’s Presidential elections. In late 2000 the case of Gotham City vs the United States was brought before the Supreme Court by Wayne Industries lawyers, accusing Congress of directly causing the deaths of every citizen who died during No Man’s Land.

While the claim that the law itself had been unconstitutional was upheld, no individual convictions were made, and Gotham entered the 21st Century even more isolationist and distrustful of outsiders than it had been before.

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't the usual kind of fic, but comments are still appreciated.


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